The market for virtual reality is rapidly evolving regarding its hardware components. Further applications are the result of this progress. In addition to the gaming market virtual reality offers further possibilities and advantages in research. That way this technology provides the investigation of perceptual phenomena. Therefore the present thesis aimed to examine the induced roelofs effect in a virtual environment and in reality in front of a computer screen. The roelofs effect describes a misperception that occurs if a persons midline and a target surrounding frame are offset, which results in a false localisation of the object. Thus the present study provides insight into the influence of a computer screen regarding this effect. Moreover, conclusions concerning the suitability of virtual reality in perceptual research are drawn. The results obtained by the virtual reality indicated a greater degree of perceptual distortion. Therefore the fixed frame of the computer screen can be assumed as an additional orientation.

One of the greatest goals in computer graphics is the aesthetic representation of objects. In addition to conventional methods, another field focuses on non-photorealistic renderings. The so-called example-based rendering is an area where users can transfer their art style to a pre-computed 3D rendering, using a hand-painted template. There are some algorithms that already provide impressive results, but their problem is that most of these procedures count as offline methods and are not able to produce results in real-time. For this reason, this work show a method that satisfies this condition. In addition, the influence of the run-time reduction on the results is investigated. Requirements are defined, to which the method and its results are examined. Other methods in this field are referenced and compared with their results.

In scientific data visualization huge amounts of data are generated, which implies the task of analyzing these in an efficient way. This includes the reliable detection of important parts and a low expenditure of time and effort. This is especially important for the big-sized seismic volume datasets, that are required for the exploration of oil and gas deposits. Since the generated data is complex and a manual analysis is very time-intensive, a semi-automatic approach could on one hand reduce the time required for the analysis and on the other hand offer more flexibility, than a fully automatic approach.
This master's thesis introduces an algorithm, which is capable of locating regions of interest in seismic volume data automatically by detecting anomalies in local histograms. Furthermore the results are visualized and a variety of tools for the exploration and interpretation of the detected regions are developed. The approach is evaluated by experiments with synthetic data and in interviews with domain experts on the basis of real-world data. Conclusively further improvements to integrate the algorithm into the seismic interpretation workflow are suggested.

With the emergence of current generation head-mounted displays (HMDs), virtual reality (VR) is regaining much interest in the field of medical imaging and diagnosis. Room-scale exploration of CT or MRI data in virtual reality feels like an intuitive application. However in VR retaining a high frame rate is more critical than for conventional user interaction seated in front of a screen. There is strong scientific evidence suggesting that low frame rates and high latency have a strong influence on the appearance of cybersickness. This thesis explores two practical approaches to overcome the high computational cost of volume rendering for virtual reality. One lies within the exploitation of coherency properties of the especially costly stereoscopic rendering setup. The main contribution is the development and evaluation of a novel acceleration technique for stereoscopic GPU ray casting. Additionally, an asynchronous rendering approach is pursued to minimize the amount of latency in the system. A selection of image warping techniques has been implemented and evaluated methodically, assessing the applicability for VR volume rendering.

While Virtual Reality has been around for decades it gained new life in recent years. The release of the first consumer hardware devices allows fully immersive and affordable VR for the user at home. This availability lead to a new focus of research on technical problems as well as psychological effects. The concepts of presence, describing the feeling of being in the virtual place, body ownership and their impact are central topics in research for a long time and still not fully understood.
To enable further research in the area of Mixed Reality, we want to introduce a framework that integrates the users body and surroundings inside a visual coherent virtual environment. As one of two main aspects we want to merge real and virtual objects to a shared environment in a way such that they are no longer visually distinguishable. To achieve this the main focus is not supposed to be on a high graphical fidelity but on a simplified representation of reality. The essential question is, what level of visual realism is necessary to create a believable mixed reality environment that induces a sense of presence in the user? The second aspect considers the integration of virtual persons. Can characters be recorded and replayed in a way such that they are perceived as believable entities of the world and therefore act as a part of the users environment?
The purpose of this thesis was the development of a framework called Mixed Reality Embodiment Platform. This inital system implements fundamental functionalities to be used as a basis for future extensions to the framework. We also provide a first application that enables user studies to evaluate the framework and contribute to aforementioned research questions.